Looking Back Read online

  It would be inaccurate to say I hated school. I had a good time sometimes, usually when I was liked, and therefore on top. And with all the other clean-haired girls who had neat penmanship and did their homework, I took advantage of my situation. When I was on the other side of the teacher’s favor though, I realized that my sun-basking days had always depended on there being someone in the shade. That was the system—climbing up on one another’s heads, putting someone down so one’s own stature could be elevated. Elementary school was a club that not only reinforced the class system but created it—a system in which the stutterer and the boy who can’t hit a baseball start out, and remain, right at the bottom, a system where being in the middle—not too high or low—is best of all.

  I had imagined, innocently, on my first day of school, that once the kids saw how smart I was, they’d all be my friends. I see similar hopes on the faces I watch heading to the front every September—all the loved children, tops in their parents’ eyes, off to be “re-evaluated” in a world where only one of thirty can be favorite, each child unaware, still, that he is not the only person in the universe, and about to discover that the best means of survival is to blend in (adapting to the group, it’s called), to go from being one to being one in a crowd of many, many others.

  1963

  FOURTH GRADE WAS THE year of rationality, the calm before the storm. Boys still had cooties and dolls still tempted us. That was the year when I got my first Barbie. Perhaps they were produced earlier, but they didn’t reach New Hampshire till late that fall, and the stores were always sold out. So at the close of our doll-playing careers there was a sudden dramatic switch in scale from lumpy, round-bellied Betsy Wetsys and stiff-legged little-girl dolls to slim curvy Barbie, just eleven inches tall, with a huge, expensive wardrobe that included a filmy black negligee, and a mouth that made her look as if she’d just swallowed a lemon. Barbie wasn’t just a toy, but a way of living that moved us suddenly from tea parties to dates with Ken at the soda shoppe. Our short careers with Barbie, before junior high sent her to the attic, built up our expectations for teen-age life before we had developed the sophistication to go along with them. Children today are accustomed to having a tantalizing youth culture all around them. (They play with Barbie in the nursery school.) For us, it broke like a cloudburst, without preparation. Caught in the deluge, we were torn—wanting to run for shelter but tempted, also, to sing in the rain.

  WHEN WE WERE IN fifth grade, the girls in Mrs. Herrick’s class were called aside and told that we were going to see a very lovely movie just for us, all about growing up. They gave us invitations to take home for our mothers so they could see the movie too, but I, like almost everybody else, disposed of mine long before I reached home, unspeakably embarrassed (because I knew, of course, what was coming—they’d been showing this movie for years), and the last thing I wanted was to sit through it with my mother, to let her know I knew, to see her seeing me. The boys pestered us, of course, and wanted to know what was going on; they were to spend that hour playing basketball and figured we must be cooking up some kind of party for them. A few of the worldlier ones were silent and understanding-looking (they had older sisters, and knew something about the Trials of Being a Woman) and one or two said, “I bet it’s about Kotex”—they didn’t quite know what it was, but they knew there was some kind of machine in the girls’ room and they saw the ads in magazines and everybody knew the story of Tom Callahan, who, when his mother sent him to buy paper plates and napkins, came back with the wrong kind and said, “Feminine napkins, masculine napkins—what difference does it make?”

  Some of the girls took all the questions from the boys in stride and said, “Get lost,” or “Go blow.” I wasn’t really shy, and not a blusher, certainly, but this seemed too sensitive an area for casualness. Telling dirty jokes was one thing, but taking sex seriously (and not, as we usually did, giggling over its ickyness and groaning “Grossness plus”)—that was harder. Four-letter words and slang I could pronounce with no trouble, but the official terms, the ones printed in the little pink booklet they gave us to take home, in preparation for the Now That You’re a Woman film, words like that (and woman was one) caught in my throat. Becky and Carol and I looked in the dictionary for “menstruate” and “penis.” Not for definitions, just to see the unspeakable in print. The Old Man and the Sea shocked and thrilled us because Hemingway had written for all to see—even teachers—urinate. (Worse still, he spoke of urinating over the side of a boat “OOOhooh,” we giggled, making faces, “gro-oos.”)

  The school nurse came to our classroom the day of the big movie to guide us through The Experience and answer questions afterward. (Who on earth would want or dare to ask a question?) A few mothers came too, and sat beside their daughters, who tried hard to ignore them. Our mothers, that year, were in the category of our going to the bathroom. Everybody knew we did (just as they knew we had mothers) but we tried to disavow any knowledge of those facts whenever possible. (That year I gave up drinking water during school because asking the teacher for a bathroom pass seemed just about unthinkable. That long walk up to her desk, with all eyes on me. Then down the hall and into the pink ammonia-smelling room marked Girls, with dirty pictures—done by girls, I wondered, or by infiltrating boys, and if they’d come in once, why not again?—and then those little cubicles with the doors that rarely stayed shut, unless you held them closed with your foot or went with a friend to stand guard, who’d hear you, then, and know that, just like everybody else, you did it too. Finally, to enter the classroom again, seeing everyone—especially the boys—look up. Knowing where you’d been, having imagined you there, most likely—just as, when they went, you imagined them, step by step, and tried to guess exactly when they’d reappear. Now he’s flushing the toilet … now he’s zipping up his fly … now he’s washing up—or did boys wash?—and, if not—My God, you’d held their hands in gym class, doing foxtrot.)

  Mrs. Logan, the nurse who came to speak to our class, was the same one who delivered me when I was born (an additional shame—she’d seen me naked). She introduced the film and talked very softly, as if someone had just died, about “something very beautiful and exciting” that was going to happen in our bodies. Then she turned out the lights. It was an animated film made by Walt Disney, with characters who had familiar Cinderella lips and Bambi eyes. But this time Disney was animating ovaries and uteruses, cute little eggs and wiggly sperm that looked like tadpoles. Worse than anything else about the whole humiliating event (it seemed so public, with nothing left to private discovery) was the fact that the film was made by Disney, joy of my childhood, who now escorted me out from the gilded carriage to be met by sperm-faced ushers at the door of this unpleasant new pumpkin.

  Clearly not all the girls felt as I did. Some were full of questions when the movie finished, many of them the show-offy, asked-for-the-sake-of-asking kinds of questions whose answers could be of interest only to the asker, and probably not even to her. (Like the kids who, as late as twelfth grade, would hold up college boards by asking, “What do I put in the blank where it says ‘middle name’—I don’t have one.”) My sense of delicacy about the subject was certainly extreme. But it seems to me, even now, unfair to put some kinds of young girls through the type of cheery, gung-ho, isn’t-this-fun facts of life talk that they gave us at school. It wasn’t the facts I objected to—sex education I certainly applaud. It was words like “special” and “cherish” and “miracle” and “gift,” the notion of Woman’s Secret Burden, with connotations of brave, silent suffering (the boys would never know what we went through—for them; we’d let them think they were the tough ones)—that’s what I detested, and why I entered adolescence with some amount of anguish. The boys were almost encouraged to be goofy and playful, happy-go-lucky, while we got left with being Women, suddenly matronly, with images of cramps and making up excuses not to swim—all that ahead of us, our sexuality something to be concealed, while boys could flaunt theirs on their chests and chins.
(They brandished their razors, we hid ours.) I knew a girl whose mother said she couldn’t shave her legs till she was fourteen—while, at twelve, she badly needed to, and had to pluck her legs, like eyebrows, in a closet.

  And then there were bras, and the dilemma—when to buy one, what kind, when to wear it and with Kleenex stuffed inside or not. Some girls really needed them by junior high, and a few needed, but didn’t wear them, and came to crossing their arms or bundling up in thick cardigans even in June. Others who didn’t need bras wore them anyway—flat strips of nylon stretched across flat chests, worn for the telltale outline they made under jerseys, not so much in the front, but in the back, and for those occasions during dances when a boy would rub his hand across your back and feel delicious pity at what you went through (Burden of Womanhood again), all of which made you, in your slavery, wonderfully feminine and—key word—vulnerable. By our day, the bra had come full circle, from object of necessity to be concealed as best one could to unnecessary object of fashion to be displayed, where, as with make-up the idea was to let people know you were wearing it, but just barely—making it look as if you really didn’t want people to see.

  All fifth graders are obsessed with sex—the boys, with their mostly bathroom and bosom humor, of course, and—a bit more secretly, but more profoundly, the girls. Never so loud or raucous, they do not leer or whistle, or jab each other in the ribs and call out “I see London …” when the waistband of a boy’s shorts shows. Their sex talk is softer because it’s less taken for granted and smiled at than the boys’ is (“Boys will be boys.…”), but it’s there, all right, whispered under the blankets at Girl Scout sleepovers or in heads-together huddles on the playground. Boys, coming home from school at three, would weave and spin on their bikes, making little orbits around us as we walked, standing up on the seats when they passed us, to call out some new and thrilling combination of four-letter words, or taking their hands off the bars and giving us the finger. And we would clutch our neatly lettered notebooks to what we still shyly referred to as our “fronts” and speculate about the sex lives of our teachers. The little boys were being nothing more than little boys while we, the fifth-grade girls, who saw special movies and wore bras and dreamed of John Lennon and the eighth-grade baseball team, we were the true pornographers. Our shyness about real-life sex, when it concerned us personally, was concealed behind the gusto with which we dwelt upon its aberrations. Never acknowledging our own sexual vulnerability, we were thrilled, shocked and titillated by the exploits of others.

  And in a classroom full of smart, wise-cracking dirty jokesters, I was the biggest know-it-all of all. Whether my sex information was accurate or not, the point is that I thought it was and, thinking that, I set myself up as the counselor and information center for our class. I was full of sex lore; I glibly expounded on the meanings of the most sophisticated Playboy jokes; I had vague but elaborate notions about lesbians and eunuchs and—when the explanations were too embarrassing to give—I escorted my friends into the girls’ room at school, wrote out the definitions on toilet paper (or drew explanatory diagrams) then, after showing what I’d written, dramatically flushed them down the toilet. I wrote pornographic stories and circulated them at school, hoping of course, to buy myself an in. The situation is a common one: the never-wholly-accepted kid discovers that he’s got something negotiable—a swimming pool, a talent for math, an electric Yo-yo, an exploitable knack for writing dirty stories and so he thinks, just briefly, that he can parlay what he has into social capital, that now he will be liked, plummeted to stardom. Cocker-spaniel eager, he repeats over and over the song and dance that worked so well, brought him such favor, the first time round. It’s the one tune he knows, though, and so of course his audience tires of it—by that time, they’ve found a new court jester. The whole point of the jester system is that the briefly well-loved clown-show-off can gain at best only a temporary place within the group. He interests them only so long as he is different from them. They are amused and entertained—fond, even—because he is and will always remain an outsider.

  Anyway, for a while I basked in my role as classroom sex expert, until the subject filled my life almost completely. Somewhere I had read about phallic symbols, and from then on my girl friends and I imagined them everyplace we looked, which wasn’t hard, since everything except a square is either longer than it is wide or wider than it is long. (I realize this now, but back in fifth grade it seemed as if my landscape was filled with innuendo, with richly sexual, symbolic Meaning.) We marveled at our history teacher’s calm (how thick she was; didn’t she know?) as she described to us, while we sat frozen with mixed relish and horror, that monumental event of 1889, the erection of the Eiffel Tower.

  I set myself up as a counselor too, full of advice for girls just starting out with boy friends while I had none, myself. Suddenly, though, just about everyone else knew more than me, and what they knew came from experience, not books read in the closet, men’s magazine advice columns read, one sentence at a time, from quick, nervous perusal in the drugstore. By seventh grade, the make-out parties had begun, and my ribaldry wasn’t funny any more because it ridiculed a world more and more kids were entering, while I remained outside.

  MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, I enjoy an experience that lets me like, really like, people. That’s not so simple for me, quick to find fault and suspicious, when I don’t find it, of over-goodness. It’s not that I don’t feel affection for a good many people, but blanket love, the kind Miss America contestants always swear to (“I love tennis and horseback riding and people …”) has never come readily to me. That’s what I liked about Pete Seeger—he brought out my most tolerant side. By all sorts of short-cut devices (a specially joyful banjo-picking style, blue lights, and certain combinations of notes —there must be a formula—that never fail to make me want to cry with love), somehow he always made me feel generous-spirited. It never worked on records, and two hours after hearing him, the desire to run away and join the Peace Corps or send my money to India would have worn off. But in the concert hall it worked. For once I didn’t care about standing out—I reveled in assimilation. Boundaries (me and them) disappeared. It was us, the audience—we were a single body. Pete Seeger didn’t sing or play all that well. Often he just strummed his guitar. Fancy picking wouldn’t have seemed right for his gritty dust-bowl singing, his drab shirts and baggy pants that looked as if he’d spent the day farming. His Adam’s apple was more memorable than his nose or his mouth—it throbbed, and seemed to be the heart of him. Resonant, mellow notes wouldn’t have been right for that thin neck, stretched forward and turned toward the ceiling in a way that always made me think of a crowing rooster. His songs were not exactly distinguished either—rarely beautiful or sweet-sounding, anyway. They were simple lines you could sing along with and whistle later to yourself on the way home. Pete Seeger talked a lot during concerts. That was part of what you paid to get, the long, low-key introductions that explained what he was going to sing, or who wrote it. Not funny, Las Vegas-type jokes, these were more like bedtime stories, ramblings, and you were never quite sure when they were finished because they didn’t have what you could call punch lines, or even endings.

  But because nothing was so exquisitely beautiful you didn’t dare touch it, it was fine to cough or sneeze during songs, if you needed to, or hum along, or clap in time, or sing as loud and off-key as you wanted. Pete Seeger taught us harmony parts and led sopranos, altos, tenors and bass all at once, switching melody lines from rooster-falsetto—with the neck stretched like a licorice whip—to low, low bass notes, losing the tune sometimes. He would cue us with each line just before we sang it, walking around the stage or putting his foot on a chair and stamping hard, turning red in the face and looking really happy, making us feel that we were a special audience, able still, after all these performances, to stir him on the final chorus of “Michael—Row the Boat Ashore.” Then there was “Guantanamera,” whose preface-story we all knew so well that he had only to s
ay the first words for us to break into applause.

  We sang “We Shall Overcome” and dedicated it to the civil rights workers who died in Mississippi, and once (I heard him often) he asked us all to take each other’s hands so we formed a single chain. We sang “This Land Is Your Land,” and I felt more patriotic than “America the Beautiful” at basketball games ever made me feel. We applauded ourselves at the end, and stood up, wishing there was something more we could do than give a standing ovation. Right then, with “… this land is made for you and me” still fresh and swirling, not yet settled in my head, I would have jumped over the balcony or set fire to my treasured purple concertgoing coat, I think, if he’d asked me to.

  I was eight when Joan Baez entered our lives, with long black beatnik hair and a dress made out of a burlap bag. When we got her first record (we called her Joan Baze then—soon she was simply Joan) we listened all day, to “All My Trials” and “Silver Dagger” and “Wildwood Flower.” My sister grew her hair and started wearing sandals, making pilgrimages to Harvard Square. I took up the guitar. We loved her voice and her songs but, even more, we loved the idea of Joan, like the fifteenth-century Girl of Orléans, burning at society’s stake, marching alone or singing, solitary, in a prison cell to protest segregation. She was the champion of nonconformity and so—like thousands of others—we joined the masses of her fans …

  Somehow I could never imagine Jackie Kennedy going to the bathroom. I knew she must but she was too cool and poised and perfect. We had a book about her, filled with color pictures of Jackie painting in a spotless yellow linen dress, Jackie on the beach with Caroline and John-John, Jackie riding elephants in India and Jackie, in a long white gown, greeting Khrushchev like Snow White welcoming one of the seven dwarfs. (No, I wasn’t betraying Joan in my adoration. Joan was beautiful but human, like us; Jackie was magic.) When, years later, she married Rumpelstiltskin, I felt like a child discovering, in his father’s drawer, the Santa Claus suit. And, later still, reading some Ladies Home Journal exposé (“Jacqueline Onassis’ secretary tells all …”) I felt almost sick. After the first few pages I put the magazine down. I wasn’t interested in the fragments, only in the fact that the glass had broken …